


where hope is currency

by orphan_account



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Library!/University!au. Chekov is a junior at seventeen and works in the campus library. Sulu teaches horticulture and botany and thinks he knows about books. </p>
<p>(Warnings for age difference (but not underage), gratuitous plant metaphors, and pretentious literary references.)</p>
<p>Title, as always, is from a Vienna Teng song - this time it's Atheist Christmas Carol, which could pretty much serve as this fic's themesong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where hope is currency

“Change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.” John Steinbeck, _Sweet Thursday_

+

The library is warm and dry and empty, and Sulu lets out a little sigh of contentment as he steps inside.

Winter has been looming since the middle of October, and now it’s finally here. Heavy, snow-laden clouds had already been rolling in when he’d woken that morning, and by now there’s a thin layer of white over everything, making all of campus into something hushed and unreal. His greenhouses are locked up tight, all his students gone home for the holidays—it’s just him and the library and the little tea shop on the corner until January comes to call.

He shakes the snow from his shoulders and takes a breath of warm, paper-scented air.

“Can I help you find something?” someone asks in a caricature of a Russian accent, and Sulu blinks at the boy at the front desk. He is very much not Nyota, who a) would know Sulu and also know that he knows this place like the back of his hand, and b) is not a pale boy with honeyed curls draping over one of his wide, ridiculous grey eyes.

Sulu smiles at him. He looks terrifyingly earnest. “You must be new,” he says, and steps over to the counter to shake his hand. “Hikaru Sulu. I tend to hibernate here in the winters.”

“Oh,” says the boy, and shakes his hand. “Pavel Chekov, I have just started working here.” He’s wearing three brightly-colored strings tied around his wrist, blue and gold and red. His handshake is quick and firm. “Are you a student here, Hikaru?”

Sulu laughs a little, because the overblown Russian accent is apparently real and because no one calls him Hikaru and because, well. No, he isn’t. “I teach horticulture and botany,” he explains.

Chekov blinks at him. “But you are so young.”

Sulu wants retort _look who’s talking_ but he doesn’t want to be rude, so he just says, “What about you, are you a freshman here?”

Chekov shakes his head. “Junior,” he says. “I am studying astrophysics.”

Sulu gives a low whistle. “You’re how old?”

“Seventeen,” Chekov says with a crooked little smile, and Sulu shakes his head. 

“Well,” he says, “it’s nice to meet you. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next few months.” He gives Chekov a little wave and moves off into the stacks. A junior at seventeen. Christ.

He heads towards the classics section, intending to skim his way through Poe or maybe Borges, something good and dark and confusing to start his winter out right, but he stops halfway through C and laughs to himself. “Why not,” he mutters, and slips _The Three Sisters, the Cherry Orchard, and Other Plays_ off the shelf. 

He takes it with him to lunch, which means checking it out, and when Chekov sees him coming back he hops up from his chair. “That was not a very long hibernation,” he says. “You are not very good at being a bear.”

Sulu laughs at him. “No, I suppose I’m not.”

Chekov taps his pen against his lips. “Much more an otter, perhaps, or some kind of bird.” He grins. “As my mother would say, there is something of the sky about you.”

“Well, thank you,” says Sulu, and hands Chekov his book, fighting the urge to blush, of all things, when the kid raises his eyebrows at the title.

“Ah, some of my best works,” he says seriously, “although they spelled my name wrong, as always.” He rolls his eyes. “Americans.”

“Americans,” Sulu agrees, bemused, and accepts the book back when Chekov hands it to him. He starts to leave, then pauses. “I’m going to the coffee shop on the corner,” he says, “but then I’ll be back. Would you like anything?”

Chekov looks surprised but pleased. “Black tea!” he says. “Russian Caravan if they have it, but otherwise anything very black.” He fumbles for a moment under the desk. “Here, I will give you money--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sulu says, and holds up his book, smiling. “Least I can do for one of history’s greats.”

The cafe doesn’t have Russian Caravan, but it does have a blend of strong black teas that the girl swears blind is exactly the same without the name. He shrugs and orders that, and finishes _The Cherry Orchard_ while eating his salad in the corner. It doesn’t appease his appetite for the dark or tragic, but it puts him in a kind of distant, thoughtful mood that maybe he was craving more.

When he gets back to the library Nyota’s at the desk. “Sulu!” she greets him, smiling. Her hair is piled on top her head and silver earring jingle at her ears and she is still one of the most beautiful women Sulu has ever known. “I was wondering if you’d be in today, it looks wintery enough out there.”

“I’ve been and gone already,” Sulu tells her, and she narrows her eyes.

“Ah,” she says, “so you’ve met the new kid. Cute. Too smart for his own good.” She shakes her head. “He’s working two jobs outside of this one and still has time to get straight A’s in all five of his 300-level physics courses. At seventeen. And people told me I was a prodigy.”

“You were a prodigy,” Sulu insists, “the brightest of the bright.”

“Flatterer,” Nyota accuses, but she’s smiling. She raises her eyebrows at the cup in his hand. “Did you bring me coffee?”

Sulu gnaws his lip. “Um,” he says, “no, it’s. Tea for the new kid.”

Nyota raises her eyebrows at him, but doesn’t comment. “He’s in the stacks,” she says, “doing shelf-reading, should be somewhere in the P’s by now.” 

Sulu nods and heads off. Nyota calls after him, steel in her tone, “don’t let him drink that near the books!”

He finds Chekov at the very beginning of R, sitting on the floor between stacks, surrounded by books that he is placing tidily into piles. As Sulu watches, he slips three more off the shelf and sorts them, muttering to himself in Russian. The concentration on his face is weirdly endearing.

Sulu clears his throat, not too loudly—it's a library, after all—and Chekov looks up, a little crease between his brows, and smiles at him. "Hello," he says. “You’re back.”

“What are you doing?” Sulu asks, looking at the piles of books around Chekov, the empty shelves in front of him. 

Chekov blows out a frustrated breath. “It’s all wrong,” he says, “someone has put R101.5.A5 Z454 before R101.5.A5 Z46, and all like that down the row, it’s terrible, who was doing this before I am here?”

Sulu squints, thinks about the people he’d seen around the library in the last year and a half, is forced to finally shrug. Other than Nyota, he hasn’t really made friendships, here, he came—comes—to the library for the books, for the silence. “People come and go,” he says, a little guiltily.

Chekov makes a little wounded face. “So cruel!” he exclaims. “Will you forget me so easily, when I am gone?”

Sulu laughs at him, a little, has no other response. “I got you tea,” he says, holding up the cup, “but Uhura says don’t drink it near the books.”

Chekov nods and pushes himself easily to his feet, stepping out of his fortress of books and neatly into Sulu’s space, stealing the cup from his hand with a smile. “Let us go sit,” he says, gesturing at one of Sulu’s favorite spots to read, a line of comfortable chairs under a high grey skylight, and Sulu, as he only has one book in hand and it’s one he’s just finished, has no reason not to follow him.

Chekov perches on the arm of one of the chairs and Sulu sinks into another, Chekhov’s plays on his knee, and Chekov leans in and steals it, flips through it with idle curiosity. “Are they good?” he asks.

Sulu lifts an eyebrow at him. “I was under the impression that you wrote them,” he teases, and Chekov beams at him, all dimples and bouncing curls.

“I wrote them,” he says loftily, “but that does not mean I have read them. I abhor self-obsession above all else.”

Sulu shakes his head. “They’re very good,” he says. “Reading plays is such a different experience than reading novels. You have to...make a space outside yourself, almost, and put the characters there, rather than bringing them in to you.” He clears his throat, a little, embarrassed. “ _The Cherry Orchard_ is probably my favorite, I am always interested in things that are like...on the cusp? One thing into another.”

“Like libraries,” says Chekov, still looking down at the book in his hands.

Sulu blinks at him. “What do you mean?”

Chekov looks up at him through his curls. “Libraries,” he says. “They are so old-fashioned, no? Books are the wave of the past, Hikaru, the future is digital. But books still carry a weight, an authority, that words on a screen do not. So we use words on a screen to keep track of words on a page, try to weave a balance between.” He looks fondly around at the stacks. “All these old men, dead, their brains kept here. Like Lenin.”

It’s a sharp left turn into uncharted territory—Chekov, it seems, is nothing _but_ sharp left turns, nothing but wide, wise grey eyes that don’t lead anywhere that makes any sense. It’s a long time since anyone caught Sulu so thoroughly and consistently off-guard, and he finds he kind of likes it. “Lenin?” he asks, unsure whether he should be laughing.

“Lenin’s brain,” Chekov supplies, like Sulu should have known this. “They kept it, the KGB—" he pronounces it the Russian way, _kah ghem bueah_ —"to study, to find out how he was so intelligent. It is still in the museum, in a jar." He looks back at the book in his hand. "I was almost called Anton," he says, and smiles. "My father was fond of a good joke." He sips his tea, makes a face. "This is not Russian Caravan at all."

+

The next day, when Sulu arrives, Chekov is reading _The Cherry Orchard_ at the front desk, and gives Sulu a sunny smile as he passes.

It becomes routine to bring him tea, when he comes back from the cafe. The girl there is flustered to hear that Sulu's friend didn't like what she'd given him the first time, and keeps giving him different blends, determined, and Chekov keeps turning them down. He'll drink them—he is, Sulu discovers, overwhelmingly polite—but it's always with a little disappointed set to his mouth, and Sulu feels cafe girl's determination in himself, too, wants to make Chekov smile.

"What I think Chekhov—with an h, I mean—does best is set things up," Sulu says to him one day. "There's not a moment of wasted dialogue, of wasted time, everything leads precisely from moment to moment, even if you don’t understand that ‘til afterward."

Chekov hums in agreement, and then dimples at him. "And Chekov without an h?" he asks, "what does he do best?"

Sulu watches him for a minute, decides on honesty. "Surprises me," he says, and Chekov's pleased laughter is worth the suddenly cold stab of vulnerability the confession brings.

"Call me Pavel," Chekov says, "or Pasha, if you like, as my friends do." He adopts a serious face, looking at Sulu over his tea. "To avoid confusion, of course, when discussing literature."

"Of course," Sulu agrees, filled suddenly with a warmth he can't explain.

+

"Do you know what _The Cherry Orchard_ is about, Hikaru?" Chekov asks him one day, lying flat among the stacks, staring up at the fluorescent lights. He's just finished reorganizing the library's entire Shakespeare collection, so Sulu figures Nyota won't begrudge him the break.

"Sure," says Sulu. "It's a criticism of the old guard of Russian nobility, as well as an appreciation for their values. It's about progress and family—"

Chekov wrinkles his nose. "No, no." He says, "it is about love."

Sulu blinks at him, then smiles gently. “Sure, there are marriage proposals in the surface text, but subtextually—”

"Every story is about love," Chekov says firmly, "because every story is about problems between people, and if there were no love there would be no problems."

"That's a bit of a depressing way to look at it," Hikaru says, surprised.

“Not to me, not depressing, no,” Chekov says, and hops to his feet. "It is depressing only because you see problems as things that are, how is it in English, insurmountable. Problems are there to be solved, Hikaru, and to solve a problem is life's greatest joy."

He stretches upwards, his shirt riding up a little, like some kind of teenage philosopher gymnast, and then flashes Hikaru a smile. "Duty calls," he says, and jogs off towards the front desk.

"Some problems can't be solved!" Hikaru calls after him, and is answered only by Chekov's laugh, floating back through the stacks.

+

Christmas is always quiet—he drives to his mother's Christmas Eve, spends it with her and his aunt and his bevy of tiny cousins, helping them cook, decorating the house with garland and holly and poinsettia from the campus winter garden—but this Christmas seems especially silent, somehow.

"You seem well," his mother tells him, over wine, when the last of the cousins have been carted off to bed. "But I worry about you, all alone for the holidays."

"I'm not alone," Sulu reassures her, and it feels more true than it ever has before. "I have Nyota, you know that, and there are other people around, on campus, people who stay and work." He takes a breath, thinks better of it, finishes lamely, "there's a girl at a cafe that I've been talking to," because it’s true. Because he likes the set of her jaw. Because she's safe, and not a warm secret he has buried under the snow of him, waiting to grow.

He is scared, a little bit, of spring.

+

"Will you teach me about plants, when spring comes?" Chekov asks, perched on the desk at the front, drinking his tea. "We will exchange lessons, you will teach me like I have taught you about books."

"You didn't teach me about books," Sulu says, a little bit offended. "I knew about books, I _know_ about books."

Chekov cocks his head. "So what have I taught you, Hikaru? Or will you tell me you have learned nothing from our talks?"

Sulu stares at him, a million responses blooming and dying in his head, a season of possibilities that he just lets pass. "Not nothing, no," he says, a little mocking, stealing Chekov's triple-negative and making him laugh. 

For a moment he worries that it won't be enough—for a moment Chekov continues to stare—but his eyes are like winter sky, no hint of leaf or bloom, and he slips down from the desk. "Work," he says, "and I am keeping you from your reading."

Sulu nods, and gathers himself, and tries to reclaim the warmth of the hibernating bear.

+

"You like edges of things," Chekov says, “the passage of one thing to another.”

It’s a few days after New Years (which Sulu had rung in with Nyota and far too much wine, in what is becoming a tradition. New, however, was the hand laid on his arm, the concern in her eyes.

"What?" he asked.

"I just hope you know what you're getting into," she said, and he pretended he was too drunk to know what she meant.

She didn't believe him. She never has).

"I do," he says cautiously, to Chekov. It's 9:15, getting towards closing time for winter hours, and they're the only people in the building, the reference librarians and reserves staff having gone home at five and seven respectively. 

"Good," says Chekov, and his grin is wolfish. But he doesn't do anything, just sits back, and so Sulu, curious, turns back to his book—Steinbeck, now, _Sweet Thursday_ —and tries not to wonder what the hell Chekov meant. 

At 9:30 sharp the book is torn out of his hands and Chekov is racing away through the halls with it, and Sulu, outraged, gives chase. It’s not proper library etiquette by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels surprisingly good to stretch his legs, and Chekov’s fucking fast—darting through the stacks and up the back stair, up and around and up and around until Sulu’s dizzy with it, and before he can grasp what’s happening he’s tumbling out of the roof entrance, yelping about security and alarms and—

—and they’re on the roof of the library, seven floors up, just as the full moon slips up above the horizon. 

“I disabled the alarms,” Chekov murmurs at his side, “it was not difficult.”

The whole of campus is laid out in front of them, shining with reflected moonlight. It's like they've stepped into some kind of ghostly world—he wants, he wants to quote something Dickensian, maybe, something, anything, but this is too much theirs for the voices of dead men to echo.

“Pasha,” says Hikaru, meaning it teasingly, but it’s muffled by night and snow into something fragile and wondering. He swallows and continues, trying to keep his voice light. “When was the last time you found _anything_ difficult?”

Chekov grabs his shoulders and spins him so they’re facing each other, his eyes huge and intense in his face. Their breath mingles, hangs in the air between them in a silver, shifting cloud. Sulu’s heart is beating loud and too quickly.

There's a moment of frozen silence, and then Chekov lets out a little sigh. He steps back and away, going to sit on the edge of the roof. "I only meant that there is a switch behind the desk,” he says brightly, a little emptily. “I did not have to hack anything at all.” He gestures to either side of him, the edge of the roof; to the moon where it’s letting go of the horizon and touching gentle hands with the clouds above. “See,” he says, distant, almost sad, “edges.”

Sulu runs a hand through his hair and will never admit how badly he’s shaking. He goes and sits down next to Chekov, thinks about the library sleeping beneath them, hundreds of thousands of words lined up in precise rows, not a single one of them free to be said, here, now; not a single one suitable for the feeling of Chekov’s fingers threading through his.

"Happy New Year," he says, instead, and doesn't pull away.

+

"It is my birthday," Chekov says, "in three days."

Sulu looks up from T. S. Eliot, breathes, carefully, in and out. "Eighteen," he says, as off-hand as possible. "Are you excited?"

Chekov looks at him sideways, his long fingers still sliding down the spines of the books as if he is cataloging them--and maybe, by now, he is, just doing it by touch, the tips of his fingers brushing over letters stamped into paper and knowing them as well as his eyes. "Why should I be? I have been drinking for years and I cannot vote, I am not a citizen." He shrugs, a little, and turns back to the shelf. "Eighteen only matters for sex."

Sulu swallows, waits—and can't wait, anymore, for whatever Chekov will say next, for the reason he brought this up. "What do you want for your birthday?" he asks, too quickly, after too long a pause.

Chekov turns to fully face him, head cocked to one side, appraising, and it's not fair that someone nearly a full head shorter (and so, so much younger) than Sulu is able to make him feel so small.

"Tea," he says finally, "real, Russian tea, the girl at the corner cafe is more wrong every time she tries." He takes a step closer to Sulu, smiles a little. "Please."

Sulu nods, a little numbly, looks back at his book, and tries to ignore how hyper-aware he is of Chekov's every footfall—of how close he comes, the way he kneels at Sulu's feet to scan the lowest shelves, and how it feels, finally, when he moves away, less like a loss and more like a slow, singing stretch; the string of a violin being tuned too high.

+

It's two days later and nothing about the library has changed but the air feels wrong, too close, and he checks out Poe at last, taking it from Nyota with a quick smile and heading out into the snow-bright, blinding day.

He ends up on a bench outside the cafe, drinking coffee gone cold and losing himself in a heartbeat not his own.

+

It's three days later and he doesn't go to the library.

He tells himself it's because he deserves a day at home, once in a while—that he should clean his kitchen, clean his office before the semester begins, in one terrifyingly short week. It's all true, but that doesn't mean he isn't lying. It's a satisfying contradiction, somehow literary in its cowardice, and he actually gets most of his kitchen clean, calls it a day well spent, when his doorbell rings.

Chekov on his doorstep is a fir tree in the desert. It cannot possibly be there, unbelievable to the point of terror—but it’s also a promise of relief, of cold clear water running deep beneath shifting sands.

Chekov brushes past him, shouldering him out of the way.

"At least we know you're not a vampire," Sulu says weakly, without really knowing why.

"Let the right one in," Chekov says.

"That was a good book," Sulu says, "but a better film."

"I am surprised you are reading anything not written by dead men," Chekov says, and strips off his heavy coat. Underneath he is wearing a white wife-beater gone grey at the seams and loose, torn jeans and those ever-present three strings around his bird-boned wrist. He has arm muscles, though, surprising on his thin frame; is muscled all over, really, Sulu's seen it in the flashes of Chekov's stomach when he stretches, but now, in Sulu's kitchen, wearing the polar opposite of his neat button-ups and brightly-colored skinny jeans, he's suddenly and overwhelmingly _male_ in a way that make Sulu take a harsh breath in through his nose.

There are dark smears of grease on Chekov's long-fingered hands.

Chekov notices his gaze, smiles a new, bitter smile, says, "I work mornings at a mechanic's."

Sulu glances at the clock—it's 11:30 at night—and back to Chekov's face to see the smile curl further, but not any happier. "I also work there when I am angry."

Sulu closes his eyes. "Ah."

They stand in silence for a minute, and then Sulu says, "sit, sit, please, do you want anything, tea, or—"

"Tea," says Chekov, "yes, thank you." He's polite even when angry, and Sulu feels his fern-heart unfurl, push outward with insistent leaves, carving some hollow space right at the core of him. He hesitates, then gets down a silver tin, the price tag still on the bottom, and measures the loose leaves carefully, puts water on to boil.

"The strings on your wrist," he says, to say anything, and because he does want to know, has always wanted to know. "What do they mean?"

Chekov's face is solemn. He spreads his fingers wide against Sulu's table, looks down at his hands. "They are for my friends," he says, and slips a finger up under the red one, untangles it from the others. "Montgomery Scott," he says, then picks the blue one, "Leonard McCoy," and finally the gold, "James Kirk. Names you will know."

Sulu raises his eyebrows. "I will? Why?"

"They are going to space," Chekov says with certainty. "I wear these to keep them safe until I am there to do it myself."

"They're at NASA?" Sulu asks, surprised, and Chekov nods, the tension in his shoulders easing a little, talk of his friends siphoning away his anger. "And that's where you want to go," Sulu says, "when you finish here."

"Yes," says Chekov simply, "that is where I will go." 

Questions bubble up in Sulu’s mind—but you’re not a citizen, but you’re only seventeen, but but but—but he doesn’t say any of them, just watches Chekov, just looks at him, just tries to imagine the kind of certainty that runs through his bones, always.

Chekov's still looking at his hands. "What about you, where will you go?"

Sulu blinks, surprised, always surprised. "Go? Well, I mean, if I get tenure—"

Chekov snorts, harsh, and Sulu stops to look at him. "Tenure," he says, almost snarling it. "An old man's word." He crosses his arms over his chest, and Sulu looks away, doesn't think about what it does to the muscles in his shoulders.

"I don't know," he says instead, and then, underneath the kettle's whistle, "I thought I was happy here."

Chekov's eyes follow him as he takes the kettle from the stove, as he pours, as he steps closer to slide the mug across to Chekov’s hands. 

“Happy,” he says, “staying the same, being here in this small place with your small books and your small plants.” He doesn’t pick up the tea, doesn’t move at all, just stares at Sulu with blazing eyes. “I do not understand you, Hikaru, you are so, so.” He clenches his fists, hard. “You are the smartest person I have ever met, the best person, but you waste yourself here, you limit yourself, you hold yourself back, always, like you must always be frozen solid. Heat will not _kill_ you, Hikaru.”

Sulu takes a breath, is surprised at how steady it is. “No one calls me that,” he says.

Chekov blinks at him, thrown, apparently, from whatever speech he’d planned. “What?”

Sulu licks his lips, feels sick weight settle in his stomach. “No one calls me Hikaru,” he says, “except for you.”

Chekov stares at him, suddenly pale and small and so much like that first day they met that Sulu wants to slip back there, into his former self’s boots, and take a winter-long vacation—go to, to California, or Florida, or Hawa’ii, somewhere he can lose himself in heat, in physical heat, in the right kind of heat that burns the seeds of things before they can begin to germinate. There is too much time, in the winter, to put down bad roots.

That, of course, is simple cowardice. Nothing literary or satisfying, just a grown man sitting at his kitchen table, terrified blind of the seventeen—eighteen, importantly, immensely importantly— _eighteen-year-old_ boy across from him.

Chekov, finally, speaks. “What am I supposed to say to that?” he asks, voice small, “what do you wish for me to take from that, are you telling me to feel special or that I should stop? Is, is this a prompt,” he continues, voice heating up again, “that I should step back, fade into the crowd, that we have had our winter and now spring begins and you are not Hikaru to me, and I am not Pasha to you, you want me to call you Professor and forget what, who you are to me?”

Sulu lets his eyes slip closed. “That is who I am to you,” he says. “I am a professor, and you are a student.”

“No,” says Chekov. “We are students together, you and I, students of the library and of the world, there is no other learning and no other labels matter. We teach _each other_ ,” he says, insists, and Sulu opens his eyes to find him leaning across the table, grey eyes shining moon-bright with unshed tears, and fuck, no, no, this is not. How it goes.

He swallows hard, smiles, horribly, or more likely grimaces, skull-like, jaw and teeth clenched to hold back tears of his own. “You look boldly ahead,” he quotes, as gently as he can, but the words shake apart in his mouth, “isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future because life is still hidden from your young eyes?”

Chekov stiffens, shocked, and Sulu immediately regrets it, regrets using Chekhov-with-an-h like this, as a weapon, almost, regrets twisting something so profoundly _them_ to this purpose. But perhaps that’s best, isn’t it, perhaps that’s what needs to happen. If the seed cannot be stopped from sprouting it must be torn out wholesale.

But Chekov angry, it turns out, is just as unexpected and just as brilliant as laughing, happy, joking Chekov, and he stands, all pale angles and wiry muscle, runs a hand through his perfect unruly curls. “I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth,” he quotes back, bites it out, savage: “I do not _want_ to understand you.”

Sulu stares at him, at the way his chest moves with his angry breaths, at the hand fisted in his hair, at the wild wet parting of his mouth, and can’t move.

When Chekov does, it is to pick up his tea. “So that is that,” he says, just Chekov again, just Pasha, not a wild bitter boy spitting words a hundred years his elder. “I am in your kitchen, telling you what I am telling you,” he takes a breath, “wanting you as I am wanting you, and you are sending me away.”

Sulu wipes a shaking hand across his face. “Yes,” he says, somehow; it is herculean.

Chekov blinks slow. “Even though the law is no longer between us, even though it is only the words that keep us apart?” He firms his lips a little. “Even though it is my birthday?”

That, of all things, makes it easier, makes Sulu able to fit again inside his own skin; it’s a childish response, if a justifiable one, and it reminds Sulu why he is doing this thing, this thing that goes against all his body and heart tell him. “Only words,” he says, almost able to be amused, and then, “yes,” again, firmer this time, and his smile is less of a rictus, if only by a little. “You should drink your tea before you go.”

Chekov does, in one defiant gulp, and then stops, takes a sudden shocked breath, raising his fingers to his lips. His face is complicated—too many things in quick succession for Sulu to make out any of them clearly—and then he’s moving, swooping into Sulu’s space, his fingers curling around the back of Sulu’s head, and they’re kissing.

Chekov is kissing him. Chekov is kissing him and he can’t _not_ kiss back, can’t help the tiny, helpless noise that gets swallowed up between their mouths. Chekov’s hands flex in his hair, once, and Sulu’s own hands are balled up so hard on his thighs that his palms ache from the press of his nails, and then Chekov pulls back. He doesn’t go far, just far enough that he can look at Sulu’s face. His thumbs are on Sulu’s cheekbones and there is nothing in the world except the grey of his eyes, and then he’s pulling back further, not touching, moving away, picking up his teacup and putting it in the sink.

“Okay,” he says, coming back to the table, folding his arms around himself. “Okay. I will go away now, and we will pretend that it is the tea I have been wanting from the moment I first saw you.” He takes a breath. “Come see me sometimes,” he says, “at the library?”

“Yes,” Sulu says, gunshot quick, “yes, I-I will.”

Chekov nods, not meeting his eyes, and slings his coat over his shoulders. He pauses, at the doorway, gives a little chuckle—the shadow of his normal bright laughter. “Goodnight, Professor Sulu,” he says, and then he’s gone.

Sulu licks his lips, tastes real Russian Caravan and the memory of a sweet, clever mouth. “Happy birthday, Pasha,” he says to his empty kitchen, and unclenches his fists.

Later, when he’s brushing his teeth, he notices the dark smudge of machine grease across his cheek. He resists the urge to leave it there forever, to let everyone think it’s a birthmark or a scar, and scrubs it away with soap and water.

+

The next week passes slower than Sulu can remember time ever moving, but he manages to keep himself busy. He gets his office clean. He organizes his tool sheds, buys new seeds, new potting soil, sorts through his old seed stores and gets rid of anything rotten or dried out by winter’s cold. He eats alone, while drawing up lesson plans or sketching out plant bed layouts, sitting in a kitchen that has never felt too large or too small for him but this week feels both.

He drinks too much coffee and no tea at all.

Nyota takes him out to dinner, the day before classes begin. She is not a woman much given to hiding her emotions. She waits until they’ve ordered, and then, voice low but sharp as a whip, asks, “what the hell did you do to Chekov?”

Sulu folds and unfolds his napkin, thinks of paper cranes. “Nothing,” he says, because it’s true. If anything, Chekov has done things to him—plucked him from the ground so every breeze threatens to take him away. There are tears at the back of his throat. He ignores them, because they are always there.

She levels him a look. “Sulu, you’re my oldest friend, but you’re absolute shit at lying, and I know he went to your house on Friday.”

Sulu straightens his fork on the table, looks up at her. “How?” he asks, as calmly as he can, because the idea that Chekov might have talked to her about that night is. Unbearable.

"Because I told him where you lived," she says simply, and he stares at her, unblinking.

"Why?"

She sighs. "Because I underestimated how much of an idiot you are." She folds her hands in front of her, leans forward. "I love you, and I love that boy, and I can see that you're the best possible thing for each other even if you can't."

"Nyota," Sulu says slowly, "he's a student."

Nyota shrugs. "So? I slept with my professor at Yale, you remember, I was _dating_ my professor at Yale. This isn't the fifties. He's of age, just be discreet and no one will give a shit."

Sulu drops his eyes. "I know." He takes a sip of his water. "Do you talk to him, still. Spock."

Nyota looks at him, her face clearing into something like understanding. "No," she says, "not really. But I loved him."

Sulu just nods, once.

The waitress arrives with their food, and Sulu eats without tasting, really. It's a disservice to the food. "Did you ever ask him about his bracelets?" he asks after the silence stretches too long, lays three fingers over his wrist.

Nyota shakes her head, watches him.

"They're for friends of his, friends who are going to be astronauts," he says, and then chuckles, a little, "and he's going with them. To NASA, Nyota, to the stars."

Nyota puts down her fork slowly. "And you let him go," she says, disbelieving, "you found a boy who loves the sky the way you do, and _you let him go?_ "

"That's _why_ I let him go," Sulu grates out, and his throat suddenly aches with the force of not crying, days of not crying. "Not the age, not the authority issue. I'm not going to be an anchor, Uhura, I refuse to keep him here when he's meant to be--out there, braving the universe, fucking--" He presses fingers into his eyes, shakes his head. "He's meant for better things."

"And you're not?" Nyota snips, but it's an age-old argument, one not worth having again, and she knows it. She shakes her head at him. "You don't know that you'd keep him here. You don't know that you'd tie him down."

"And the other option?" Sulu tilts his head at her, blinks stinging eyes, twists his lips. "What, I have him for a year and then he graduates and is gone, and we don't talk, not really, I'm. A memory, to him, someone to be mentioned once a year to his friends over dinner?"

"You're not Spock," Nyota insists, "and Chekov is not me. All stories don't end the same way." She watches him for a minute, then sighs. "Speaking of dinner, ours is getting cold."

Sulu blinks, hard, and nods, and they eat.

"Why, um," he says over coffee, "why did you ask me what I'd done to Chekov? Is he—has he not shown up to work?"

"Oh, he shows up," Nyota assures him. "Silent and scary-efficient, like everything he's doing is life and death."

"There were no good options," Sulu protests, "you see that, don't you, I did what I had to do?” It comes out questioning, and Uhura doesn’t reply.

When they leave she pulls him up into a quick, fierce hug. “I just want you happy,” she says, thin fingers in his hair, cradling him close. “Both of you, if possible, but you most of all.”

He wants to say _I will be_ , he wants to say _just give me time to forget_. But instead he just nods, and sniffs pathetically into the shoulder of her dress, and squeezes her hand when they say goodbye.

+

Spring, inevitably, comes, or at least the spring semester does, and Sulu is very busy, teaching theory and the science of botany for the weeks before it warms enough to open the greenhouses and start the real work with his students. He finds a kind of solace in bending his mind to his students, away from himself and his helpless longings. This is why he’s here, after all; the bright bloom of minds under his care _does_ make him happy, and he knows he’ll be even happier once he has his hands in soil again. 

But every time he goes home to his empty kitchen and flips open his cabinet, there’s a little silver tin of real Russian tea staring back at him. 

The smart thing would be to get rid of it, throw it out or give it to someone else or even just drink it himself, but the first time he makes himself a cup he get such visceral flashbacks— _warm lips hands in his hair desperate needing_ —that he pours it down the drain immediately and stands, shaking, at the sink.

He goes to the library before class the next day.

He hopes, kind of desperately, that Nyota will be working the desk, that he can drop off the tin, maybe with a note, and not have to actually see Chekov's face. But as soon as he steps inside Chekov's eyes are on him, and Sulu can't do anything but look helplessly back.

He looks—he looks tired. He has physics textbooks spread out across the desk and a pencil tucked in the curls behind his ear and he looks really, really _tired_. His eyes widen as he takes Sulu in and he stands up in a rush, and then doesn't seem to know why he has. Sulu wonders if he know just how much he holds the power, right now, just how much he always has.

"Professor Sulu," Chekov says, softly, and it's torture and absolution all at once. Sulu sags with relief, steps up to the desk.

"Hello, Chekov," he says. "I brought you something of yours."

Chekov blinks slow at him, not sitting down. "Did you," he says, his eyes not drifting from Sulu's face even as Sulu slides the little bag across the counter to him. “Thank you.”

Sulu nods, and clears his throat a little. “How are you? How-how are your classes?”

Chekov smiles at him, just a little, his eyes soft. “Good,” he says, “they are good.”

Sulu nods again, might never have stopped nodding. “Good,” he says. He feels, inanely, the urge to shake Chekov’s hand, as if they’ve concluded a business deal, but. Touching him would probably be the worst move, right now. He takes a breath. “Well,” he says, “I’m glad you’re doing well.”

“Yes,” says Chekov, “you as well.”

Sulu gives him a last stupid nod—he probably looks like a fucking bobblehead—and turns to go.

“Professor,” Chekov calls after him, and he stops, one hand on the door. “You have kept one promise, coming to see me here,” Chekov says, “will you keep the other?”

Sulu turns to look at him, and Chekov smiles wider at him, his pencil tapping his lips. “You promised to teach me about your passion,” he says, “your plants, your growing things.”

Sulu wills himself not to blush and not to stare at his mouth, and is about halfway successful at both, which is better than it might be. “I will,” he says, “in February, when I open my greenhouses, I’ll teach you.”

Chekov nods. “February, then.”

Sulu walks to class knowing he’s made everything more difficult for himself, and trying desperately to care.

+

Even before February he finds time to stop in at the library once a week at least. It’s not, at first, in order to see Chekov—he is a professor, he does use the library for official purposes—but he’s never been particularly good at lying to himself, and he knows how much better he feels when Chekov, even busier than he, looks up from his physics textbooks and smiles.

It’s easier than he thought it would be, to slip back into their friendship, so long as he doesn’t get too close. At first that means only stopping to say hello at the desk, and then it means just exchanging a few words if he happens upon him in the stacks, and then. Everything’s okay, Chekov is laughing again, they’re okay. The tension is easing from Sulu’s shoulders and so he lets himself seek Chekov out, when he has time, find him where he’s shelving or organizing, just. Sit with him, read while he moves silently through the stacks, and it feels good, a rhythm he’s used to, just the drumbeat of them and no singing violin.

On weekend evenings they supplement tea with sandwiches, and sit across from each other on the garden wall, watching the world wind down.

“Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear,” Chekov quotes softly, almost too softly for Sulu to hear him. He’s lit up blazing-bright by the orange of the sky, the perfect golden light of the slumbering sun.

Sulu looks at him, wants to laugh, wants this to be the kind of moment where he laughs. “In the book he’s talking about land and economic policy, Pasha.” The nickname slips out, and he freezes, sees Chekov freeze as well, just a split second of surprised immobility, and then he relaxes, leans back on his hands to stare up at the darkening sky.

“It is not in the book,” Chekov says simply, “it is here, in the air, between us.”

+

In February Sulu recruits Chekov to help him open his greenhouses. It seems safer and smarter than having him tag along with one of his classes when he brings them here. This way they really are students together, students of the library and the world, and he can teach in the way that he’s coming to realize only Chekov would really understand. 

It would be easier to ignore all of Chekov’s words echoing off his kitchen walls if he hadn’t been so right.

He unlocks the first greenhouse and breathes in the damp, musty air, looks happily out over the rows of tables and little shallow beds, the stone pathways between covered in a thin layer of ancient leaves and flower petals. They always look a bit post-apocalytpic, the greenhouses in spring, like the fading remains of some brilliant, wealthy civilization. “Gardening is exploring,” he says to Chekov, who has stopped at his side, staring. “We never make plants do anything they wouldn’t anyway, we just. Find the perfect place for them to do it as we see fit.”

Chekov nods and steps past him, leans down to brush fingers through the new green shoots of a daffodil, sprouting out of place on the corner of the pathway. He clears the leaves from around it’s base, looks up at Sulu with warm eyes. “They do not always obey, it seems.”

Sulu just shakes his head, wordless, and watches him move on, examining all of Sulu’s work of past years. Suddenly bringing him here alone was a terrible, terrible idea, not because he doesn’t understand like Sulu thought he would but because he understands too well, treats the place with the reverence of a church, like Sulu is giving him something sacred.

The walls of Sulu’s heart are paneled glass. Chekov has always been able to see inside, but now Sulu has opened the door.

He turns and closes it again, and Chekov looks up from where he’s kneeling in the dust, his eyes widening in surprise. Sulu crosses to him, holds out both hands. His heart is beating against his ribs, but he feels calm and sure. This is his safe space, much more than the library, much more even than his own kitchen. Here he can do anything.

Chekov takes his hands, his fingers muddy, and Sulu pulls him up and kisses him.

Chekov makes a little gasping noise into his mouth and Sulu grins against his lips, kisses him harder, and then Chekov is kissing back, needy, tasting nothing like Russian Caravan and everything like himself. When Sulu slides his tongue against the seam of his lips he opens gladly, squirming closer so they’re aligned from knee to chest, pressed together, and Sulu lets go of his hands and wraps both arms around him, breaking the kiss to breathe, a little shakily, against his cheek.

“Hikaru,” Chekov breathes against his ear, and it’s like a prayer.

Sulu walks fingers up his spine, not letting him pull away even an inch, although Chekov doesn’t seem to be trying. “You’re going to leave,” he says, and it’s steady, just fact.

Chekov takes a breath. “You are going to stay,” he counters, but it’s just statement, too, not argument.

Sulu looks upward, watches the last of the snow melt down the sides of his greenhouse. 

"My love is like a stone tied round my neck,” Chekov quotes, his fingers in Sulu’s hair. “It's dragging me down to the bottom.”

Sulu closes his eyes and completes the quote. “But I love my stone.” He pulls back, looks at Chekov’s face, runs muddy fingertips over his cheekbones. “I can't live without it.”

Chekov leans in, presses their mouths together again, and Sulu breathes in the air of spring.

+

“You are the music while the music lasts.”   
― T.S.Eliot


End file.
